tv Capital News Today CSPAN August 13, 2009 11:00pm-2:00am EDT
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( shouting ) gatorade-- that's "g." but i had to bring him into the team. it's not i'm bringing him in for andy. that's not what i'm doioing. i'm bringing him here for this football team. and it's important that i made sure that i did my homework on him the best i could. and then, you know, i've talked to donovan who knows him, and to jeffrey and joe and so on. and i went through that process. it did take a little bit of time to make sure i went through th that. >> what the process -- was the process expedited at all in the end? >> no, no, huh-uh. >> it seems like you guys managed it. you did your homework, you're convinced. are you worried at all? you and jeff have always talked
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about good character. jeff just said last week that's maybe one of the biggest reasons you've been so successful last decade. do you wor hey this changes the outside perception of the operation? >> no, i think as michael gets involved, and he does what i presume he's going to do and expect him to do and the commissioner expects him to do, and tony dungy expecks him to do, and most of all michael himself expects him to do. i think that part changes. and again, that's what i can tell you. the rest of it just it's going to be time. we're looking into the future here. he's got to go through that process. but i think he's in the right frame of mind to do that. and he understands the wrong. he's out trying to change that right to wrong. and i think people once you have the chance to talk to them will appreciate the challenge that
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he's taken on. and trying to prove to people that he's okay. >> it seems it's a difficult decision for you, obviously it's a very complex issue. is it something you've really struggled over? >> it took time. it took time. i thought time was important. and so, you know, why now and not before? that's why. i wanted to make sure i covered as much as i could. from my end. and also gave him the time to reach out and do the parts that he needed to do. and that he wanted to do. and now he's done a good job with that. >> did you feel there was an urgency because of interest from other teams as well in making the decision? >> there was there were a few other teams involved. but i think those were publicized out there.
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and i, you know, did we have competition? absolutely we had competition. but was that why we did it now? no. i mean, i wanted to make sure that, again, i think like the other teams did, they wanted to make sure that they did their homework, and then michael had to make that choice. and again, he talked that over with tony, and tony wasn't -- tony's got a lot of friends in the league. so he wasn't picking teams for him. but michael had somebody to bounce it off of and talk through. and i think those are important things. >> what is it like to play against michael from when you're talking all those years about skills? >> yeah, well, he's an unbelievable athlete.
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and both running the ball, throwing the ball. you know, he loves to play the game, all those things. i think we know. those are the things we know. and he's a difference maker in a lot of areas. he can do a lot of things for you, so. that's why he was a pro bowl caliber quarterback. >> does he have any of his recent workouts on film that you were able to look at? >> i didn't. i talked to some people. i didn't look at any film. i don't believe he had any film. not that i was able to locate. and you know, he's got a couple weeks here where he can get himself into football shape. he's in good shape now, but he's got to get that other part done. and get back into the swing of the football part of it. >> what is your plan to practice
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him at this point? will he be out there saturday? >> he'll be out there saturday, yeah, uh-huh. and then we'll just, you know, we'll see. you guys will be out there, you'll see how we go about it. i'm just going to ease him in. make sure he -- we don't pull hamstrings on or quadriceps or all that stuff. ease him back into it. i've got some good quarterbacks here, you know, but we'll start introducing them back into the football side. we've got a couple of weeks to work with here. >> do you have any concern about your personal life outside of football from the standpoint that this room, i guess might not view it that way, but there are people out there who are going -- >> i've had my space invaded. i've had people in the trees taking pictures of me around my house and so on. so i understand how that works. i've gotten pretty good at it
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brady returns to the nfl. and so does michael vick. the eagles take a chance on the fallen star. >> tigers having the best year of anyone on tour. but there is one thing missing. tiger in search of that at hazeltine. plus, with justin verlander, cc sabathia, jason marquis and cliff lee, we have a handful of aces. we're dealing now on espnews. >> we're live from the espnews room. john buccigross, jw stewart. and thursday turned out to be quite a day in sports. tiger woods playing golf. all you baseball aces and a big day in the nfl.
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infrastuckture with a head coach, an established starting quarterback, and andy reed, strong coach, strong general manager type. and a passionate fan base. and donovan mcnabb is an established starter, because michael vick knows this is going to be a transition. >> he spent a lot of time in the west coast offense. at the end of the day, this is the same offense he ran in atlanta. greg nap, very good friends with marty mill who is the offensive coordinator. colin plays in philadelphia. so there is going to be a familiarity that will immediately impact his ability to get on the field. i think also he'll have a package of plays where he can play receiver. they can put mcnabb and vick on the field at the same time. could you imagine that? >> known as much for his running ability as his passing. there is clearly room for michael vick in phillie. eagles back-up quarterback situation was a bit of a question mark with kevin cobb banged up with his injury did not appear to be too serious head being forward. now the eagles have added a dynamic play
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maker to their depth chart. fans in phillie, however, not as sold on vick as our experts. >> this is the worst ever. this is worst than getting terrell owens. if we would have got t.o., this would have been a better move than getting this. >> michael vick is not the world's worst. you've got people in the nfl that were instrumental in the death of human beings, and if they didn't get the storm that michael vick is getting. >> he made a big mistake. and a lot of people in politics all over the world make mistakes and get second chances. why can't he get a second chance? >> i figured there would be a team that was going to be stupid enough to pick him up. i knew that was going to happen. but i never thought it would be the eagles. i get this whole second chance thing. but don't you have to earn a second chance? what has this guy done other than serving had his time to show us that he's a changed man? i haven't seen anything. >> the eagles will have a news conference friday morning at 11 eastern at the nova care
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training complex. tony dungy will be there with vick. you can see it. and vick's first practice will be on saturday. >> 5:58. that's how long tom brady played last season. he missed the entire preseason with a mysterious right foot injury. and then safety bernard powell rolled into his left leg in the first quarter of the season opener. for the first time since the knee injury and the pats open for pret season in phillie. this took a back seat to all the michael vick news. brady to chris baker, the former jets and it's 7-0 patriots. ensuing drive, the eagles love to run the screenplay. donovan mcnabb to rookie mccoy. gain of 17 yards. also 10 carries for 55 yards for mccoy. that would lead to a field goal. ensuing patriots drive, brady
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going deep for randy moss. but it's picked off by shelden brown. brady, however, would shake off mistake. as he played until late in thesi first half. here we are in the second quarter. brady goes back to moss. inside the 15. three catches, 54 yards for number 81. same drive, 3rd and 7. brady goes back to chris baker. brady 10 or 15 for 100 yards, two t's, and a pick. and brady happened to be back. >> i think there were some good thicks and some bad things probably as we all expected. it's a preseason football. it's a lot of things we're working on. and you know, we haven't played in a while. not only me, obviously, but the whole team. offensive football is about chemistry and timing. and there are some things that
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went well, and i'm happy we scored a couple of touchdowns in there. julian had a great punt return which really sparked us. it's good to get a win. but any time you take the field, it's hard to get a win. >> most quarterbacks don't like to get hit. but did you want to take a hit to see? >> yeah, i was just going to hold the ball in the pocket and just kind of cuddle up with the ball. no, finally on the quarterback sneak, but i was thinking, god, i wish someone would just come and blast me. and you get a little of that anxiousness out of the way. but i'll have to wait. of the offensive line does a great job. you know, they're the ones to be thanked. >> chris baker did great. there were a couple of challenging reads for him that came up tonight. i was really excited about the way he reacted. >> how they thought they would. he made a heads up play, instinctual play. he's been doing that all camp.
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if he can do that, it's going to be a huge as iset to this offense. those two touchdown catches he made were really good plays. you know what, i think it's a real small step for this whole team in a very long journey. you know, we're on a mission this year you know. this is the first step. it's a small step, but it's a step in the right direction. and i think defensively we did some great things. and offensively, scoring points is what we've got to do. we did that at times. in the second half we had some short yard situations we could have done a better job on. but phillie's a great team. a playoff team last year. they're one of the best teams weefer played in the last ten years they're very well coached and they execute very well. it was a good first test for us.
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>> how excited were you to be back at the level? >> well, it took, i think, there's no place i'd rather be, so that about sums it up. it's just i mean this is a place where i've probably had the most fun and enjoyed the most. preseason game, you know, it doesn't have quite the feel of a regular season game, but still to be out there on the field with my teammates and celebrating after a win and the bus ride home and the ride to the airport and flight home, those are things you probably enjoy the most. >> was it for you like getting back on a bike? >> yeah, i've played so many games. i felt excited to be out there. i think it's just, you know, not real nervousness, but just trying to understand how the game's going to go and get a feel for the game. and i missed some throws that i wish i would have made just wasn't as accurate as i would have liked on some of the receptions.
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the throws weren't great throws. but i think you're just trying to get the speed and the tempo of the game and make the right reads and throws. and that comes with confidence and being in there and playing and executing in these games. so we've got another one next week that hope leefl we can build on. and two more valuable ones after that to be ready for the monday night game. >> pats go back home for their preseason home opener next week. i compare tom brady's last full season was the year he won the mvp. and matt cassel came off the befn, and did very, very well last year. 21 t.d.'s. almost 370 yards passing. and parlayed that to a starter's job in kansas city. >> so lot of big names in the news on thursday. but no bigger name than tiger woods playing in golf's final major championship.
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and say i am not dependent. but all of a sudden i saw this woman ayyad deep loneliness and helplessness and no matter how much i loved and empathize with my father and i did love and empathize with him in a way i've never done with anyone else, i felt some sense of cruelty and leaving this woman at this stage and feeling justified to lying to her so i felt much closer to her partly also now because i was grown-up. i had my own life and as a woman i also saw things about her that i would not have seen when i was five for 6-years-old. >> host: but also as a woman who's been very outspoken and in favor of women's rights in iran and elsewhere you forget your father perhaps rather easily.
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>> guest: one thing i mentioned in my book my philosophy teacher told me if you want to know you really loved a man, if you love his dirty socks it means you really love him and that is how i feel about love and forgiveness that people you love, you love them not because they are perfect or because you think they are perfect. you might as a child. as a child she was the ideal and then there was a point i was deeply disappointed with him. but you come to the point where you love especially your parents or children despite them because of their imperfections because you feel to be perfect is to be dead. life is full of imperfections, and so lightning makes you for giving. writing makes you more understand. >> host: have you forgiven him? >> guest: i have. the person i would like to least for davis myself rather than them.
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i would come down hard on them but i think i come down hard on myself as well. i needed to clean accounts with myself. >> host: as. >> guest: i think that in order to be kind to myself i had to admit to what i did not like about how i behaved not just words my parents. the words my mother i could even understand how being in that situation you would feel constrained and react. i felt very guilty about my first marriage although i was very young when i married him he was not the kind of man that i approved of and i did it out of reaction to my mother. i did it for all of the wrong reasons and although he was -- she had a lot to be -- you know,
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complain about. i blame myself for getting into a relationship. >> host: you mentioned that the divorce came at a time when the law for women had became much worse. that she was in many ways abandoned not by only her husband, but in her view probably by her children but also by society. >> guest: yes. >> host: so the creation of this everyone against her became a self-fulfilling prophecy. >> guest: this is sort of the most amazing things i've seen on a personal level that what we predict about ourselves a lot of times comes true because we move in that direction. if i believe that you are my enemy and are asking me these questions, you know, with some ulterior motive, but act towards you in a way where you might become my enemy. so, that is why i have the metaphor of mirror in my book
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for a poet i very much admire, feminist poet. it's important to look in the mirror and see that other self of yours you don't like and to confront and accepted and than to confront other people on a level that is claimed and more compassionate >> host: when you look into the mirror today what of your mother do you see yourself? >> guest: i see both the good and bad. we were both very opposite. [laughter] we can't keep our mouths shut. [laughter] >> host: and you admire that? you see that, you feel that it is a sign of integrity to be in flexible. >> guest: you know, one has to be careful. it is a sign of integrity to be
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true to your own values. it would become dangerous if you become and flexible. what saves me from inflexibility is writing. i remember when i was writing reading lolita in tehran. in relation to the regime or people who were working with it, in reality i was angry. i felt bitter but when i was writing my book, i remembered the student who was the head of the islamic students association who was the kindest most honest person towards me in my pool while most secular colleagues were not objecting to us being expelled he was the one who stood up for me. i remember the guy who belong to the islamic militia who had gone to the war in iraq and came to
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my university one morning and poured petroleum over himself and set fire to himself. that instability that i had about the system in my mind was broken by these memories that now i had to fight. my own grandmother was a muslim. my student was a practicing muslim who i loved and to get to there were others who were terrible who commit crimes and so, when you write you become a generous and you need to or at least become space to everyone, their view. in real life you can be far more inflexible, far more bitter. so for me, riding helps me to control my own and lead -- >> host: >> guest: need to be obstinate to be a writer as well by you
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need to leave room, truth always goes beyond you. the truth is always much more complicated and much more revealing than what ever you are or think you are. >> host: the conversation is naturally slipping into politics and understandably so because an interval in your book and in your life your parents were both political personalities and played very important roles in much of your history. one thing that to me stood out is how your fault there ended up in jail. he was the mayor of tayler on, as you described his utmost to do public service to the best of his abilities to remain on corrupted, to stand up to the power of being, yet he was put in jail by the shah as a result of a conspiracy by the head as
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well as the prime minister at that time, and he was there for several years. these are very painful years. you have read about it in the newspapers while you were in switzerland. yet i sense in the book, and please explain to me a lot of your anchor and a lot of your dad's anger was directed towards the head, the secret service of the shah as well as the prime minister. but i do not get the sense that it was much anger towards the shah. >> guest: know, there was. i am sorry if it doesn't come out, and you know, but i even learned and was not trying to bring out in my book is that at some point you stop being angry at people, individuals and focus on a system because again iran, modern iran especially has been a very paradoxical entity both
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good and bad from the past have remained. modernism also comes, i mean, we constantly think that this is ruled by religion. it is not. fundamentalism is a very modern phenomenon and democracy is not the only part of the fascism and communism are also very much worse and we have had all of this. we have had a per-share of liberalism, fascism, communism in iran as well as tradition, good and bad. and so what i wanted to in part in my book is that this paradox at some point has to be resolved into some other structure were constantly one aspect will try to negate the other. the shah i mentioned for example the shah started one aspect of the past which was the ancient persia, you know, and he blood, the titles he would give himself
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all of that. now, the islamic regime is sticking to one aspect of iran which is the distorted view of islam. during the shah ayyad time, there were institutions, there were many freedoms that even today we are enjoying because of the past like relation to when inflexible. for heaven's sake we have a minister for women's affairs who was only the second in the law whole world. but at the same time, this institution but constantly come into contradiction with the political system that applies close, that was part dependent on the image of one person and so it made the political system for daschle and people like my father who would be politically outspoken even within the government would find a little space for themselves.
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there were many people like generals, all these people who were also put in jail but none of them stayed as long as my father and he refused to leave and he refused to apologize. he said he wanted to defend himself and he began his defense with a poem in fact. so, it is all these complications. and to be fair, my parents wanted to -- too much because they were ambitious but wouldn't play the games. they both liked politics and distained politics. >> host: you're father's friend said that, he is too honest to be in politics. he would be destroyed. >> guest: you have to know who you are. i discovered that about myself a lot of times when i become too political, i lose my sense of
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myself because you can criticize politics as an outsider or as a pariah, as a writer and intellectual, but if you are not a politician, you know, then maybe you should rethink where you are, you know. so, they also herald this tension. >> host: you mentioned early on you had this streak that you got it not only from your mother but also from your father and perhaps expressed it in a different way. you've always been that rebel. que rebel against your schoolteacher, about your mother, against the current government in iran but also against the shah. when he would read the book it's fascinating. you have been all over the political spectrum. you have been part of the opposition to the shah but you also get the sense that you
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perhaps want to distance yourself a little bit from that. do you regret some of your opposition to the shah? >> guest: iowa regret being too ideological. the problem with the opposition at that time and sometimes opposition then and now was that we were so self righteous and we were so inflexible that if you want human rights, if you want a more open system that's great and i believed then and believe it now. why criticize and actively in at least myself was that harshness where he would not allow the system to expand and change to begin with. secondly, the methods we used were only confrontational methods. i remember we protested against
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the most popular iranian poet who lived at the time facing many dangerous none of us have faced it. when he came here because he would not use the slogan. he would not use a slogan dow with the shah and i am so ashamed of myself standing up to this man who lie so much admired. i still admire so much for his poetry, not his politics, and demanding that he go only with mine. during the time when the prime minister was chosen in an interim period who was a little man, democratic minded man, people like me were still wanting to overthrow the regime. we never thought what will come after it. so we cannot really blame shah or islamic republic completely for what happened to us or because we were part of what
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happened. and it is that both in personal life and public life we should open up. if you want to change it is not confessional. you know, whom to blame. but if we want to change, we have to know what we have done, and in order to avoid doing it again and i do regret my ideological stance and that i am against dictatorship and u.s. pro china during mao time where even beethoven was forbidden to play. yes, i do. >> host: it is fascinating when you describe it is all about the slogans and people confessing and taking sides as either or. do you think much has changed? >> guest: i think after the islamic revolution and after the death of so many ideologists because the soviet revolution i think helped also and telling that ideology alone doesn't work
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one thing that happened after the revolution as we had to question ourselves. on a as a woman had to ask myself what someone like mr. mahmoud ahmadinejad says about my past schiraldi and woman is it true so i had to read history and i discovered no, in fact women like me have the past not just in the west but within iran ayyad own history that, you know, we are part of this larger world and we are iranian but we also want to be happy. >> host: once again we are going back to the farosi palms which was a woman. >> guest: eustis a government come and go. only the trace of genius remains. look what has in the word in iran in history. we might not remember the king
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at the time, but we definitely remember fardosi. i might not remember exactly when mark twain was riding who was the president, but i do identify the best in this country with twain. so, for me, if fardosi of thousand years ago could give shape to a woman who what openly express her love for the man she finds attractive not just platonic lead essentially and in fact before they get married, if in our history we have a book like this where it goes for hundreds of pages you talk about one woman who declares her independence who says i am faithful not to a conformist marriage, arranged marriage, but
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to love. if we have these women in our history and then when we come to the opening of the 20th century we have women who fought for their rights for public education, for the right to wear or not, then we have women that tell us our potential, what we have been and what we can be. so, my protest is not unlike during the shah ayyad time when my protest was political, now people interpret it as political. it is existential. it has nothing to do with any particular group or overthrow of the regime. it goes far deeper than that. >> host: i would like to take a couple of thousand of years earlier than that and talk about the daughter who gets to choose her own husband because he told
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her you are the ones who is going to live with her, the husband, why are you asking me. so you have that streak in the culture. >> guest: i am glad you mentioned because of that at least 3,000 years, half of that we have been the ancient religion and after islam have of it has been sunni. then we have the shiite that is a mix of all of these things. for heaven's sake, my name is azar which means december which is the deity for fire. will we still celebrate the right of spring in the religion? so this is islam are so intermingled where does one end and the other began? and one reason i wrote, not one reason i wrote but both of these books were a response to when i came to the u.s. and i saw how reduced the image of my country at that time had become in this
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country or what we call the west they did not see the variety. we were reduced to just politics , to mr. mahmoud ahmadinejad. they would look at you and me and say but to our western as if life, liberty and happiness belongs to america. that if i am a woman from it all i do not like choice. i enjoy being a muslim woman does not pursue happiness and these were also issues that i responded to when i was writing. >> host: in one of the reviews of the book, they made the argument that perhaps your mother ayyad delusion about herself, about the life she created, the illusion that you got sucked into it in many different ways and became a part of it is a metaphor for the illusion of iran, a country that
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has an image of itself and what it wishes to be and thinks it is deserving to be bought is constantly underperforming. is that what you had in mind? >> guest: i knew that in writing this book i was also responding to different feelings and emotions about iran about the concept what home is or was. but people who read the book always had insight that you necessarily did not have. i do think that we have an illusion of the past and if like my mother we become frozen and do not have a critical and dynamic conversation with the past we will never leave that past. we can change regimes every ten years and will still not leave the past. of course every country has illusions.
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look at this country that now is ours. look at the way some people describe what america is, which is a very frozen image and then some don't. so what nationality like with our parents we are constantly carrying a conversation. >> host: going a little bit back again, we talked about the beginning of the revolution. we talked about how your active in the united states protesting. >> guest: in this very city. >> host: you were an activist, an opposition figure, an organizer and so was your husband. >> guest: yes, he was much better at organizing than i ever was. >> host: and you were taken by surprise how things developed. >> guest: you mean iran? >> host: iran. this is not the revolution you signed up for. why were you taken by surprise? >> guest: well, talk about
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illusion. first of all one of the most amazing things about iran is not how the religious, it is modern iran has been some secular sometimes we forget it did have another aspect. malae in a movement that was mainly secular and as you mentioned marxist we have this illusion that we were the real opposition with mr. ali khamenei and the iranian students abroad they were very small and we never took into serious consideration. we would call ayatollah khomeini. we never understood his bases and was he saying. >> host: when you're speaking on significant disconnect. how did that come about? has it been resolved? >> guest: the whole point is what partly has been resolved
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because we are forced to face reality. now we go to the other extreme where a lot of people who explained only explain us through ayatollah khamenei ayyad islam. i keep reminding people that before the islamic republic this country has reduced to one component like turkey, iran, afghanistan, saudi arabia, had names and they were far different from one another than u.s., germany and france yet we don't call these kristen come trees -- christian countries. muslim people like this, muslim people like that. we forget that variety outside the country. i think inside the country people are much savvier. we know that we come from very different places. secular, jews, armenians, agnostics, a feast, muslims and when we are muslims we are so
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different. this is a lesson of the revolution how we will use this lesson will depend upon. we should stop homogenizing ourselves and getting only one image of iran. let all different images come out. >> host: you're telling a fascinating story about intimate secrets you are putting out, things you have been silent about. it's fascinating that you are always left with the question is a comprehensive. are there still things you remain silent about? >> guest: i think as long as one lives there are things one has been silent about. the importance -- i was just saying this morning one of my favorite writers since we've lived twice. once when we live in reality and once when we talk about
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>> mabey private contributions. >> honestly i don't know. >> i would say commercials. >> advertisement. >> something from the government. >> 30 years ago america's cable companies created c-span as the public service. a private business initiative, no government mandate, no government money. a discussion now about the $787 billion economic stimulus package passed in january. this is hosted by the brookings institution in washington. it is an hour-and-a-half. [inaudible conversations] >> i would like to welcome everyone to brookings this morning. i have been many times over the years i have sat out there with you all or i am sure some of you probably very people were out there, but is really fun to be up here on this side, be kind to us. we are here as you all to talk
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about the stimulus, and as the title of the program pretty much says it all six months has it been a boom or a boss or obviously somewhere in the middle. and i am jackie calmes, national correspondent at the new york times. my one year anniversary in fact was this week after 18 years of "the wall street journal" here in town where i know some of you have at least talked to some the phone. i am going to be mostly asking questions and listening and writing like i always do as a reporter and was particularly happy to be asked to be on stage with these people. barry speed line, as many of you know is going to give the macroview sort of of how the stimulus has worked. he has and amy liu is an expert
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on the metropolitan area of this country and will tell -- a huge country and a federalist system just how well this is working or not working given how the recovery is right now, and amy is the deputy director and co-founder of the metropolitan policy program. russell whitehurst on my right is a senior fellow and incoming director of the brown center of education policy at the brookings institution. he has held a number of positions in the department of education during the bush administration. and chris zimmerman will give us a particularly real-life you how the stimulus has been working. chris is an arlington county board member and has been a resident of arlington county now for 30 years.
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so, i will start out by asking some questions of each of them. you've got a lot of papers you can look over. it might raise some questions and you're own mind. and then they will have some discussion. and about 11:00 i will open up to some questions from some of you, which i will be interested to get and take notes on, too. c-span's is covering this as some of you might know. so when you have questions, let's get to the plate and -- because there's a lot of people here that probably do have questions. but it's my rocket to get the first one, and with that i was interested in just asking barry to give the broad view and in light of this week in particular and the past two weeks we have seen some positive signs of recovery or at least as the federal reserve but yesterday "a leveling out" of what is called the great recession, and to what
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extent are those positive signs due to the stimulus, the $787 billion stimulus plan? >> well, i think i would say the good news is the recession is coming to an end. the bad news is as usual, the government policy hasn't had too much to do with that. [laughter] the problem with the stimulus program has been -- to get going. the crisis hit in mid september. koln chris never acted on till the spring and then it takes a couple of months for the government agencies to get set up. so most of the money is going to be spent in driving us out of the recessions in the recovery i think we will see it is a major factor for the united states. i did is now going pretty well. if you are looking of the downturn i think there is one area where the program did work
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surprisingly well action by the government come disposable income, june and july. all of that decline has been completely offset by government transfer payments and tax cuts. that's a pretty amazing accomplishment. so the disposable income during did do a lot in that one area. unfortunately consumers have been traumatized by the loss of their wealth which has not been restored so they are not spending despite the fact disposable income has held up pretty well. but the rest of it now i think if you look at the procurement programs are finally beginning to get going. i think the money has flowed through the states if many of you travel around over the next
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month he will see an extraordinary number of projects going on there is going to be a big kick to local schools that otherwise would have had to make big cutbacks the money will be coming through. most of the money is still in the future yet. don't give up on it but what is really disappointed is recession after a recession the same thing happens. we cannot get the political process to act fast enough to have a significant effect on the downturn days. >> in this case given the depth of the recession it was designed a lot of people forget as a two year plan, released capsule and in fact was this recession different in some ways in that were you right to be skeptical about stimulus package is because the political process you've described in the past that in this case the bad news
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is the recession was so bad the good news is for once a stimulus than can be helpful, very helpful. >> the good news is we have got positive things i had a loss but this is the worst downturn the united states has experienced since the great depression and we knew it was coming. will swell predicted and we back last fall it's disappointing i still find the government can't act a little quicker to step in and help during the downturn phase. instead we let it run its course and then we try to rebuild afterwards. >> are you able to say where we would be if there had never been a $787 billion stimulus plan? >> i think the most telling thing to help on the government side is the decline in, i mentioned would have been extraordinary and that would have been really right now making of the consumption situation even worse. so i think yes, you can say particularly late spring and summer the consumption situation has been a lot better than it otherwise would have been.
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business investment, no i don't think the government had any effect on it all the white you think the federal reserve effort to stabilize the financial system have actually worked quite well, fairly good side on the side that isn't much to deal with the stimulus perce. >> russell, sitting right next to me, a lot of this money went to school districts and for education is the peace the administration likes to talk about the most. do we know what is happening with that money at this point? how much of that is -- and what does it have to do with stimulus? that's what a lot of people ask me. >> those are good questions and my answer is in part a continuation of barry. i checked with the u.s. department of education yesterday. the department has about $100 billion of the $115 billion in education.
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that is in the stimulus bill to manage. and as of yesterday, 13 billion of that tax have been written for 13 billion of that. so, roughly 13% of what the department has to dole out has been sent out and tax to states and may be =to lea's but very little of the money has been spent for anything so it's sitting there in the district is checking account or the states checking account waiting, awaiting spending presumably sometime over the next two years. so if you are looking for its and passan projects and activities that began or work continued as a result of stimulus expenditure, you will have a great deal of trouble identifying them. you might, if you went to the local level find some people who can talk about the plans they've put in place and what they anticipate doing but they've not actually spent any money on
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anything. if you go to recovery.gov you can sort and a variety of ways and look by agency for projects around the country that have been funded by the stimulus. i found on that site five hits for education, totaling $25 million. .. is for students with disabilities. more than half of states have not taken a single penny from either of those big pots.
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>> other states, like california, hey basically taken every peppy that was available to them. so, some states have felt and cop vinceed the government they needed the money and needed to have checks written to them now, and others are still waiting. >> can you generalize about which those states are, require, our ban. >> i did not see a pattern, except, of course, california jumped out there. they desperately need the money, and i suppose they're getting it everywhere they can. the story is not as negative as it seems from the presentation i have begin. imagine that you have a rich uncle who tells you that -- we could call him uncle. and uncle sam has essentially
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guaranteed you a large pot of money on a date certain that will be available to you it's not available to you now but it will be available to you next year or the year after that. i thing that is significant for me if i'm a recipient of such an uncle's largesse. i can go into the red because i'm going to be bailed out. that's what happened in maryland. in january the government announced there would be mass layoffs cross the state. education funding would be cut back. today you see the governor announced the budget has been made whole and that there are historically high levels of funding for education in the state, and the accounting is addition of plus $1 billion in federal funds as allowed
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maryland to project a budget that in fact is generous for education in the context of an economic downturn and in the context of historical patterns of funding. i think one of the challenges going forward here is, what's the exit plan for this? if you have essentially doubled education funding over a two-year period, how do you turn that spigot off? are there people who are not planning on turning that spigot off? is this kind of a tuneup for the reauthorization of "no child left behind." there's been a need established for those to maintain operations. >> and, again, when you said you felt like you had been negative at the start, is it a point of criticism that so little has been spent of the education money or is it right to think of this in terms of, you know,
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talking about education and the administration and congress describes this as the three rs. in this case is what rescue, recovery, and reinvestment. we should think of the education money as reinvesting in the company for the longer term? >> i think the best way to think about the education investment, most of it. $95 billion, i averted the layoff of school staff, and the layoff of school staff would have affected the economy. the administration has been explicit about not wasting a crisis, and they certainly had a reform agenda tied into the stimulus bill, and it's interesting how the asset of education duncan has been get the money to dole out in a competitive fashion to states.
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the terms for though competitions haven't been set yet but the secretary has already managed to generate changes in state policy by telling states you're not going to succeed in competing funds if you have artificial caps on the entry of charter schools into the market or if you have not signed up with the national governors association to be part of the development of common standards or if you do not link individual identifiers for teachers to student achievement data so we can tell which teachers doing the best job, and governors and legislatures have been saying, gosh, we have to act or wore not going to get this part of the money. so it's an interesting way to get progress and reform if --
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with incentive, and 5 million is a lot. >> amy liu. this rescission, no part of the country was spared. it was not in bad as, say, new mexico, but the recovery is uneven. why is that and to what extent is the stimulus passage exacerbating that? >> i remember reading this past week that people called the recession aa statistician has dream. and hidden in the statistics is that recovery is highly uneven around the country, and what we have done is we have launched something called the metro monitor, which tracks the recovery of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country since the recession began, and we did this because
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we have to remind again our leaders that the economy is made up of a network of metropolitan economies and our able to recover nationally departments on how well detroit, toledo, vegas, youngstown, would rebound and shift to the next economy. and we focus on them because they general raid 75% of the nation's gbp. so this is the economic engine of the country and we need to ask how they're doing. this is where we work and live and where the employers reside. so let me give you some statistics off the first quarter this past year. the second quarter numbers have just come out. in the first quarter, the u.s. unemployment rate at the end of the first quarter, march or 2009
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was 9 percent but in metropolitan areas it was from as low as 5.1% in provo, utah to as high of an unemployment rate of 17.5 percent in modesto, california. if you look at home prices which i is important to property and real estate values, home prices at the national level had dropped 6.3% over the past year, for the first quarter of '09 to 08. if you look across the top 100 meant areas, home prices drop as severely as 30% in one year in stockton, california, and in vegas, and we have been hearing again how the foreclosure crisis has really rocked places like florida, california, arizona,-1/2 da, -- nevada, and
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then the home prices increased in some sparts of the done trirks rose by 7.4. in houston. so this is a highly uneven recovery and our big takeaway from this is that broad-base fiscal measures may not be enough. but they're important and we heard about how they are important, but that we are going to need probably more targeted intervention or ensure that the resisting discretionary parts of the funds are enough for local and regional leaders to bent the money to address their unique focal circumstances. because that's how a detroit and a central valley, california, others, are going have to really think. they know best how they're going to get out of this recovery and really focus on long-term
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sustainability. so how well is the stimulus package structured to do that? of the $787 billion stimulus package, 2/3 of that is dedicated to the quick-spend stuff. the tax cuts, the helping low-income families with the extended unemployment. those are were needed, those are quick funding, and they really did stave off some of the layoffs and other severe budget cuts we have been hearing about. but it is the 1/3 of the budget in the stimulus which has gotten the most attention which deals with the unique issues, infrastructure, health and grown investments, and how well are those dollars structured in i say the is a really mixed bag. if you talk to local and regional leaders there's a lot
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of the traditional funds like the highway money. listen, highway repairs, they're safe investment, needed to be done. i think most folks at the local level said let's just spend the money, not to do anything stupid. we heard from biden no to do anything stupid. but where we see the most impact this part of the three rs, that is focused on the transformative investments. how to move to a green economy, focus on reinvesting in the next generation where this economy is going, and i say at the local and regional level, this part of the stimulus package is what is generating the most game-changing initiatives and efforts to really undergird the recoveries. they have the big multiplier effect and have long-term economic value, and i tell you,
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most local leaders we talked to, they know they need to send the money out quickly and focus on job growth. they don't want to take this money and just print a short-term quick job. they're interested in creating a job that is going to last, lasting industries. they want to hatch long-term pros spirit. so what are those programs that do that? there's the $1.5 million in tiger grants which supports the multimodal regional transportation linking bus, rapid transit and hawsing. the money for high speed rail. the first time this country is going to invest in high-speed rail infrastructure. $8 billion. a slew of investments that this administration has been proud of on the green side, whether it's energy efficient homes, there'll be something that
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bright light in the stimulus package is that it created an opening for some really transformed the efforts. @@@@@@ integrated. at the beginning we heard states putting together rich lists. the most innovative efforts around the country are not a projectitis where they're funding separate projects but thinking about really transformative whole sale efforts. so. some of the thing is mention is -- or soming that hases. the city of chicago has taken a block grant and has scaled up a
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retrofit program for targeting multifamily apartments in the private market aimed at low-income renters, a group that's overlooked when it comes to efficiency and they're doing this with private sector partners. in fact, the whole thing is almost private-sector funding. and even though we know what barry or russ mentioned that what happens when the stimulus funds end? most folks know the funding will end. they're trying to figure out how to find private sector capital to extend the value and take over the programs, and this is what chicago has done. so it has a lasting impact. there are -- in kansas city,
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they've done something completely different. not going after one project fund but there's a regional council of governments taking an unpress departmented role of working with a bunch of neighborhood associations and other collaborators to basically channel, like, 15 different stimulus funds into one low-income neighborhood, and they're going to make sure, if wore going to have impact, let's at least make sure that one part of our community is going to have maximum impact. so, i think that that's the kind of create different we're seeing around the country that stimulus is succeeding in some places. >> you anticipated my last question to you about your favorite example. so now we turn to chris zimmerman who can give us a
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localized view. suburban. what's your view on this. >> i like the term suburban. if you ask the question, did stimulus help, is it helping? and as a local official, if i'm given the choice between what's happening and not having passed the stimulus bill at all, unequivocally, i'm grateful that the bill passed. there's no question. our world will be more difficult if that bill had not passed. at the same time, to start with from my perspective it wasn't enough. you look at the impact on state and local budgets, the simple fact is that the budget gaps generated by the recession, at the state and local levels, were enormous, and the amount of funding provided through this was a fraction. so just in rough terms,
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$50 billion state fiscal stablization fund was a great thing, but the budget gaps across the states were $200 billion. so you're talking about minimizing the impact of cuts and tax increases that would otherwise take place at the state level. at the local level there isn't much money that goes directly to local governments. we benefit from the money that the states get. on the education side the impact is significant and that reaches the local level and we benefited as a result of the money that came for education but there's very little that actually will come to the local love, -- leve, my county has yet to see a dollar. that's not -- we will receive about -- directly it's $9 million, which in a county of a billion dollar budget is not a
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huge amount of money. our goop was 30-$40 million. a its it's not that it's going to be helpful and there are people who are working in our county who might not in the because we know the money is company. the fact the check hasn't arrived doesn't mean it's not working bus the fact you know it's going to arrive affects who is employed. it helped us in our difficult advertise this past spring. it is too small and not too flexible, especially at the local level and that's the big problem. when people want to pay you to buy buss not not pay for bus drivers you can be in a situation where they're laying off bus drivers and they have this off tore buy buses. i don't that this is the optimal
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way in which to provide stimulus and offset the recession -- recessioner in actions. we're raising taxes and cutting spending in the middle of the recession. a lot of it is happening, and amy is right that the most significant impact may be long-term, which is little outside of the range of stimulus per se. some of the money in here, not even some of the larger amounts of money -- will have a positive effect. for instance, i'm -- i'm on the metro board here in the washington area and we're getting $200 million in fund wes need for capital. now, we had $500 million in capital needs and we're getting $200 million. we were cutting or capital budget by $150 million otherwise so it offset a huge cut. that's a good thing on a regional level. >> that's money that goes in the entire washington --
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>> the metro system, the transit system here, that benefits the entire region clearly, and is very well known right now, transit system needs a lot more investment, and at a time when funds are declining, not increasing, so having $200 million is very welcome. the kind of thing that might have a long-term impact, like the tiger grants, is something we're working now on a regional level at the transportation planning board. we have been working on an application for some of that money, and it's federal grant and we may not get it but it will relate enter modally, rail to bicycle, and it will involve all levels of government. is forced to us bring together the state highway departments in virginia, maryland, and the strict, the local transit agency, local government, and we
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have been signature around the table trying to hammer something out we can win this. the very fact we're doing that is a good thing with long-term ben -- benefit for the season. so there's a lot of positive that can come out of this. at the moment, there's a limited up in -- unable number of dollars. >> what would you advice the administration if you could do this over again. >> to get the money out in a hurry. a lot of this tax cuts and those are inefficient. a lot of them is capital programs, which takes a long time, and i always felt the best way to go about this would be a countercycle program. it would have been to get 50
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states and local government not cutting their budgets, not raising taxes and fees, and that can have an instant effect when you provide that -- that's where it did did have the big east effect with the $50 billion fiscal stabilization funding. in doing their budgets they're cutting back in anticipation of the year that's coming, people are losing their jobs or knowing they're going to be laid awesome if you did something where by formula you distributed funds that would offset that, then people would know that's not happening in your budget and you would have more impact. this is relevant because the recession is not over as far as state and local governments are concerned. supposed turns out this really is the bottom and we're moving up from here. next year, state and local governments will have a bad year, probably worse than last
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year, and that's true even if we're in recovery. everything at our level lags. so we're heavily dependent on property tax. that's by far the biggest thing. real estate values going to be recovering in any big hurry, so if you look at the last recession, the last one in the early 90s, we had -- the recession was over, i think, some like march of '92, economy is will say there were several year before you saw that showing up in the real estate assessments. in my county and other place. so at beast we're look at one more really bad year at state and local level. last year was hard. this year will be harder. >> there is anything any of the other panelist woos like to address before i take over the
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conversation again. in terms of this -- i'm just interested -- didn't want to -- i wanted to talk about what this stimulus package has done before we raise the request whether there is hanged stimulus on the horizon. but because you make the putt, and i covered state government in texas for five years, and i watched at the beginning of this decade when we head a recession and they were hit hard. as they start doing their budgets for next year, is there going to be a node from -- need for a second stimulus? >> i think it would be helpful out our level. people need to understand that no matter what they're hearing about what is happening in the economy -- and i hope it is positive and that we're going to be pulling out of this -- that isn't going to have very much impact on the next budget which is written right now in all governments and will be in the
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news and basically early next year. most governments work on a july to june fiscal year. so we have a touch of tough budget year ahead in most places, and absent some other actions, it's going to be tough. we will be receiving -- they're going to start kicking in in the fall but that isn't necessarily impacting the budget decisions you have to make for the next year. >> i think this is the one thing that was overlooked in the stimulus package. we can talk about whether there needs to be second stimulus to address this. we have been working with the league of cities that this is another sleeper issue. there has been a lot of studies
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on state budget defs. so it's hard to quantity few the local budget situations around the country. and what is fascinating is that local governments, first of all, on average, 15% of their budgets are dependent on state aids. so when the states cut back they feel the pain. the second news, they're highly -- local municipalities are highly dependent on property tax revenues. property taxes and sales taxes to pay for staffing and services. and capital funds. and we consumer spending expected to be down for a long time forks the home real estate prices expected to be down for a long time, this next year, their members are anticipating that for the first time, property tax
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receipts are dropping -- first time in ten years across municipal -- every single municipality; and there's a two-using lag because of the way they do their say -- assessment so if this year was the worst of the recession, it will -- don't be surprised the lowest point of a local budget will be two years later. so i think that that's why you're going to still hear about the fallout and the lag of this economy in 2010 and 2011, and i think many of us level in localities when our governments cut back or raise taxes. so what are the options? whether we think about a second stimulus package or recapture of existing funds. it's not that hard to do.
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the second is the bond market. i think most local states and also localities rely on borrowing at this time, and the ability to access credit and the ability to access bonding authority, municipal bounds, those are weak markets and this is an opportunity for the administration to think about how treasure where -- treasury working with wall street can resolve that. this is an overlooked piece of the puzzle:...
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state and local government. i think we need to differentiate a package that is designed to shorten the recession. it has to represent a permanent flow of federal funds to support local activities and to make them free of the necessary -- necessity to adjust in the context of a recession. i don't know where that line i don't know where that line is that we do need to remember that we have a very large structural federal deficit, and to talk about simply thea lee with the needs a year out for two years out of municipalities by transferring funds from the government simply shifts the problem from on location to another. >> i guess he did say that this ties into the health care debate too given the portion of state at least that is medicaid, the
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extent that that is increase to any health care reform will add to the problems. but, to the extent that there is any second stimulus package in the next year or two, even if it is just targeted to state and local aid will depend a lot upon how people assess how well the stimulus has done. and come issa urticate to do this. i won't make you give it a grade but given the title of this program is called the stimulus boom or bust want to take each person to take that stark choice and come down somewhere. barry, boom or bust? >> to say it is a bust is too harsh but it is very disappointing when to try to stimulate the u.s. economy so the discussion here as well, that the whole focus shifts towards long-term measures.
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we would like some investment help on this than that. we are really getting away from the subject of stimulus and trying to turn around the recession. were the usual focus is how can you get the money out the fastest in give it to the hands of people who will spend it? i am in favor of increased infrastructure investments, but the notion that there are shovel-ready projects was the myth and know where saying it. it took a long time to get these things started and we are left with basically repaving roads. that is about all we can do this summer. maybe next year but next year is too late to be significant. i think what happens in the sort of proposals this individual interests groups come in and use it. what was the phrase that somebody had? never wasted crisis. that is the worst possible thing from my perspective because you end up using the crisis for other agenda, and that is what
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is happening to this and it will be more severe had in the second crisis and a second stimulus that was in the first. but the first is too small. >> she wants an argument. we found something to disagree on. because i think that is really overstating it. number one, i think the statement about rotating. first i would note that paving roads is one of the things that is cut first though just peer paving roads in fact is drastically cut back anywhere is a news you run into economic trouble. most places have not been paving roads and ups of the fact it was available in stimulus funds were used, probably good thing. something that needed to be done and does represent immediate stimulus. the $200 million that metro is getting for instance here is important spending that in fact is shovel-ready. visa things that people are all ready to do. these are being used for buying
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buses. my county, we didn't get a lot of money but we are ordering buses that we would have been ordering. they are employing people. the fact that they have a long-term payoff is a good thing. my overall argument on the stimulus is consistent with what you are hearing on the other side of the dias which is i already for counter-cyclical revenue sharing that is indexed to the economy so it is a permit so when the economy goes up, it goes away. i think that is the right way to do it from an economic standpoint but it is true that the country has a huge deficit in infrastructure investment. in the short run, the most importuning to do is end the recession and get the economy back to potential ddp. that is what will close the gap in the short run. in the long run it is the productivity of the economy and i would argue our economy has suffered because most of the thing we have been rolling up deficits in the past eight years that we have not been worried about is not invested in our economy and even though this is a highly imperfect, nonetheless
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all that stuff being done that may not be great for stimulus are things that actually we need in this country to generate the economy that will take care of things like deficits and other expenditures that we need to be able to make in the future. >> it is a perfect statement, never wasted crisis. that is a different issue. >> i will jump ahead to you chris, boom or bust? >> hi think it is not perfect. i would not say either apply. i guess i would give it a b if i had to give it a letter grade. if i get that grant i will think it is a lot better. but in all honesty we have to see a lot of it plays up. again after the reblading to terms, one has stimulus than the other in terms of government spending what is it doing. i think most of what is being done is so desperately needed that even if it is not being done optimally in the proportions i think it ought to be done orth would be by some of
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valuation a better way to do it all of it is so desperately needed in small compared to the need that that is going to be pretty good. as stimulus just from what you hear even from what mr. bosworth was saying, the argument is a lot of the did help. a lot of this tax cut, but it did offset income and got into people's hands a minute at in some of the of the things there is a fair amount of this maybe not quite enough of a fair amount of that that was aid to people in desperate need like unemployment. my county is getting at $1.5 million that is basically helping human service. we put more of our own money to that because that is what is most needed at a time like this. clearly we would be in a much worse situation nationally, economically and locally if we didn't have it so it is not what i want, it is not as much as i wanted and not done as well as i would like them but it is sure as heck better than that they didn't do it at all. >> that 1.000000, is the part of the 9 million? >> about 5 million of it is
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transportation in the context of having hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts in transportation. it is $5 million going into things like buying buses. there's a couple of million on the energy efficiency programs and those are programs where things would happen that were being cut back that are now going to be done. and then we got some money that was for aid of various kinds that basically helps people most in need and maybe it is around 1.5 million to 2 million, something like that. >> russ, bomar bus? >> i will give you a new ones dancer. >> i thought you would. >> i think the states stabilization investment was a reasonable one. it was about $50 billion that let states avoid substantial layoffs, gave them a fair amount of flexibility as to how they wanted to spend the k-12 education, higher education and other needs. so i would give that an a.
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the topping off of traditional entitlement programs so that we put more money into title one or you put more money into the iea, that is just a run-up to increasing funding in the no child left behind re authorization. it is hard to see that as a fundamental part of the stimulus bill. i would give it a c or a d. on the reform agenda, i think the evidence is still out. congress gave the secretary of education and the administration an unusual degree of flexibility in terms of thing going a lot of money in front of states with an agenda to be set by the secretary and the president. you have to go back to lyndon johnson to find time in which there was as much power centralized in washington with respect to education policy. i think they have got some good ideas. i think we'll have to see how it plays out over the long term. i can think they have got good ideas and also have some concern about the degree of flexibility
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that has been provided. i would rather have seen that worked out in the congressional process where people have an opportunity to opine on whether they want states to have or have not caps on charter schools or whether they want national standards rather than letting that be a decision that is essentially made in the white house. >> amy, boom or bust? >> this was certainly a hodge-podge package and i think that is why we are getting hodgepodge results. so, i agree with everyone here that this is still, in need that is still to be determined. what i would say about what matters or what we can do now is that you know, the 67% that went straight out in tax cuts, a fiscal stabilization and to unemployment benefits and others, that was best.
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that is that's and that is what most folks talking about. that was then i think crafted well, and people can argue about the size and distribution between the three of those. people's frustration is that there come with a transportation is getting their money, whether agencies are getting their discretionary money out. you are right, when i saw christina roma's speech, she said of the 787,000,000,100,000,000,000 has been spent so far. 100 billion. we are still not there yet and maybe the frustration is 100 billion may not have that big of an effect on the economy and it is still to come. but, i think the agencies are doing the best they can so i would say people can quibble about the quality of the choices of some of the projects under d.o.t. but d.o.t. is hitting their 50% spending targets at--
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obligated 150% of their funds. the metropolitan planning organization who got direct funding to had one year to spend 150%. at i think those kind of deadlines that were in the bill were important people are meeting the spending targets. but on the other stuff that is discretionary, i think that rather than go to a second stimulus many of us are talking about the fact that if there's still $687 billion out there, let's make some reforms now. six months into a two-year package to speed up but also improve the quality of the spending. let's make sure the rest of the money gets used well and fast and most local people do want to do this fast but they don't want to port in a place that has no market activity. and i would say just for a couple of examples where these kind of programmatic things can happen. you know, the administration i
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thank boosted-- we hear about this weatherization in most state offices have a small weatherization program and 30 times the size of the program. the program is so cumbersome in the way the agency designed the process that it is slow for localities to spend it in some folks are avoiding it completely so it is not getting spent. those of the kinds of fixes that we can really courage be made to make sure the remaining of the funding gets out there effectively. the other is broadband as another example where people's said in the first round of money that came out of the commerce department the first round of broadband money was so nearly the find, they so narrowly defined the eligibility of on served or underserved areas that only remote rural areas could qualify for funding. and gets most business and
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private sector people who want broadband think of it doesn't opportunity to serve underserved parts of the metropolitan areas. they have cable modem or slow modem so they can boost the entrepreneurship, connect workers to the system so they can find employment. so we need to think about applying this in a way soden has the catalytic impact on the market, so we can feel it. so i think there is active conversations of how to make sure the second and third rounds of broadband money is going to be invested in a way that will have that multiplier effect and have that kind of benefit. so i think there are examples like that throughout this package that we can make sure that the existing stimulus package gets done well. >> i have a question. if you have any staff measurements that indicate where the administration or how close they will get to their prediction that there be 3.5 million jobs saved or
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created? >> i don't think any economist could answer that question. the level otherwise would have been completely hypothetical. no, i think it is unfortunate that we got into this question of new or saved. i don't think we can put a number on it. the employment losses in this recession by historical standards were extraordinary. it is just been a terrible loss of jobs. the good news is, going forward, people will be surprised on the basis of historical experience how fast the recovery comes. in past recessions the worse the decline, the faster the expansion. i am not sure that is going to happen this time because we have some continuing problems, but i think it is a waste of time to try to sort those two numbers out in any kind of detail. i am content that going forward, this stimulus has a lot of things that that should be
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creating jobs. >> which makes it the perfect political promise to create those jobs because it can be disproving. >> it is a bit of a political giving kind of thing. >> it is that time where we can open up the floor to questions and there are people with microphones are brown. i am going to take to any time, so we can get as many questions and as possible. somebody will ask a question and we will hold that thought in ask a second person, and then we will have whoever is best on the panel to answer it, do so. sir, on the aisle. and if you could state your name and where you are from. >> scott, the center for neighborhood technology in chicago. thanks for the plug amy, we designed that energy program. one of the things we learned in doing it is that it is possible to do better in things the you
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describe with weatherization assistance programs and my answer to your question had been up there is that the experiment may be a success even if some of the programs are failing. we are learning what works better than some things, and i would be interested in comments on what the latitude is to do that learning quickly so that we can calibrate this at midterm. does the federal government have the tools from congress that it needs to shift priorities? my second is an observation. i was struck with barry's comments about how important this was to income maintenance. the other half of this though is that the cost of living is still pressure on people so things like energy efficiency your expanding transit service actually either stabilizes or lowers the cost of living and maybe that should be another kind of target in addition to the economic targeting. death anybody have any comment on that, lowering the cost of
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living as a priority? and their related one would be when you said targeting amy you were talking about spatial targeting and were just finishing a report showing the formula by which the transportation money actually went out was severely biased against urban and metropolitan areas and what we do about that? that has been a traditional problem. you take the 1965 formula for public works and economic development act, that just doesn't work for the way the economy has been working. delaney none over policy from the white house to pay attention to this or what do we do about this? your basic premise is that the economy in metro areas that the basic formulas direct money away from where the economy is, so those are my questions. thank you. >> could you summarize your bottom line question in there?
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[inaudible] that is the thing. we have learned some things work better than others. it is not one-size-fits-all. if we need to cut our losses and make more of the money that has been granted, this the administration have the flexibility to do that or does congress need to do something else in a hurry to make that target work? >> let's take a question in waiting from this side from someone. this man here in the second row. and tell us who you are and who you are with. >> free lynn's correspondent. from what i heard, the basic problem is implementation. i was surprised to hear from buried that's-- from now on we
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should put more money into the private, small business because that is the sector that really increases employment and employment is the most basic thing with all the recovery. amy talked about several things, and you mentioned about the greening the economy. we don't have a greening economy infrastructure but one thing is this. this solar, i was surprised at the beginning of the year, that the solar industry is not interested in putting a panel on the annexation house. i think we should do that. also you talked about this broadband. i also tried to mentioned i.t.. you talked about health reform. hell flightiest very important and-- everybody uses it, and
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u.s. is the only country that did not pay attention to it. furthermore, i want to say this. from avalon if you do any thing you love to listen to the people like zimmerman, at the county level so from now on you'll have a completed structure on how we are going to spend the rest of the money. most importantly, i can't emphasize, you should take money from the bank to the small business. thank you. >> doesn't e1 want to take the first question about whether, as we revisit this does the government have the tools that it needs in order to make these things more effective, to sort of have best practices and spread the word? >> well, i appreciate scott's
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comments and questions. it is good to see you, scott. and it comes back to your comments too, this is about implementation. as barry said, the government bureaucracy is not really a tune for fast, flexible implementation and i'm not going to spend a lot of time about all the problems of that local and regional leaders are running into when it comes to this, but when scott asked, is there a way to scale up or accelerate experimentation. that is i think one of the desires by some of the agencies in the administration right now is that they are realizing, they are forgetting that when they put out of this money in it put out all of these programs, 350 programs, that is the same number of applicants in a local region or a local region.
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they are having to deal with 30 different reporting requirements, 30 different applications, different rules. they are trying to use funding together to have scale and even though they are trying to do this quickly, they are trying to do it creatively, they are trying to do it quiken impactful. vet row rules it really hard for them to do so and there are ideas out there on how to do that so this experimentation, the innovations of become more the norm than just the exception to the rule. and then, in terms of, if we could comment on the second question about you were mentioning broadband and itm technology. one of the things about how government programs are so isolated and cumbersome is that some of the private sector leaders and local regional
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leaders were running who are so excited about the health i.t., the broadband, and the smart grid, but they are pulling their hair out because these are now three separate programs with three separate requirements, three separate applications, when setting up a broadband system, setting up an ability for a number of multiple hospitals and health clinics in the region to share documents electronically and the ability to track and measure energy use na home or a commercial building, use the same fiber-optic cable, so rather then apply three different times are cut out the same cable three different times they want to streamline it and do it all at once and transform the technological opportunity in their community. this is the kind of delay if you
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will that makes fast. even though the creativity experimentation is there, it makes a really hard so i do think again there is opportunity for the government bureaucracy to be more responsive and more flexible to meet the way people operate and the local leaders to operate on the ground. they are mileti to be leaders in entrepreneurial here. >> i think amy's point can be stressed enough. all large part of the ability with this package is for what are reasonable reasons. the attempt was to use existing programs structures to deliver funds and there is good reason to do that because to have them replaced and so on. unfortunately large part of that, of the systems, a large part of the government bureaucracy has really been in the keeping money from going out the door and a lot of those structures haven't been implemented in ways that really were intended to promote them. they were being run by people who didn't believe in them in the first place frankly.
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and the administration coming in who is in the early stages that with the old structures. that comes out in areas i working, and transportation. what qualifies for shovel-ready, which really means procurement ready this something you are actually ready to do when you have a whole system that this made it very difficult. if you have money in hand and you couldn't have it on the key list you have to be on to be eligible so if you didn't have money and now they are giving you money and can't spend it because we are not on that list. there's a fair amount of catch-22. until they change a lot of that, especially in the area of transportation to with the intention is to promote the development of projects and using this mechanism is necessarily going to be clumsy but i think that is very uneven across government programs. some parts of the bureaucracy are good at giving money out in a hurry in some parts aren't. most of the things that are
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doing anything card like investment in infrastructure by their nature have checks and balances and those checks and balances take time. that is why i came back to my earlier point that if you are nick her you've got to basically make a general purpose, unrestricted, let them appropriated and then he will get it out in a hurry. >> question? the man in a blue shirt back here, yeah you. >> i am miller and i've been around this town for a long time but i recently moved. given that is the largest single spending program in the bill and perhaps that is because it does not say stimulus in the bill or mitigate title. it says it is for stabilization of state governments and stabilization of medicaid programs, so given we have maybe
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$87 million for those purposes in the bill, compared perhaps to hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars for stabilization of our banking system, would you judge that structure and spending, of maybe one third has gone out so far, as being an f minus? >> we will take a second question from the man here in the third row, fourth row back, a green shirt. >> i am with georgetown university. mr. zimmerman has given us one set of reasons for the difficulties in the program but more generally, when we talk about the kind of fragmentation, geographically, to what extent is this stimulus package complicated because it is the way the administration designed it, and to what extent is it because congress put things in each of which served some
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constituencies somewhere? >> is there someone in particular that wants to take the medicate question? it looks like it was directed towards this side. i am sorry, you said from g8 though? >> i can't hear. >> the question was the $87 billion estimated for states stabilization and maintenance of the medicaid program. was that well then, poorly done and i'm just sort of shocked it hasn't been brought up as a subject yet. >> i don't know. >> it comes into the category of the income stabilization, so it is then referred to in generalities, but. >> again i think most people at the state level medicare and medicaid as you know is the biggest chunk of the state
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budget. it is also, i know there was talk about that in state and local budgets but a lot of the growth across the state and local governments come from things they can't control like health care costs, pensions and rising prices of gasoline and other things, so the increasing match in medicare and medicaid has been incredible fiscal relief for states and a time when health care costs and health care needs are rising, demographics are increasing and allowed them to in some ways plug those deficits and really think about where they spend elsewhere. so, i would say it was very important. .. might not have been the best thing to have in there. the claim is that it is a pork-
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free bill. but, you know, that goes back to the old saying that one man is worthy project is another woman's pork. who wants to take the question? i think it is a good one, because the public, so much of the public's in view of this is shaped by is it pork and is it not? that is an important one to address. >> i think the question was a little more. we can argue with a sport comprehensively and how much is a result of legislative process which is not quite entirely the same thing as the pork question and my impression is this is very much a congressional act reflective of the necessary 60 votes in the senate and that necessarily resulted in the character that it has.
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that is what is going to happen in almost anything that will become wall in the united states of america. that is how it is designed and at the branch will always have an ability to craft anything of that size without congressional interest coming in to it which i don't think it's a bad thing by the way because that is the united states of america. >> the striking thing about the obama administration so far is he is not -- apparently does lossy the interest in crafting an initial version of anything serious health care program is basically left for congress. the stimulus program originated in its structure on capitol hill. i'm sure there is informal and put into the process by the administration but as compared to the past where administration's proposed the program and then argued for the program that's not the way this administration has worked so i think it is right it is a congressionally initiated program and it is unnecessarily complex because you've got to
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satisfy lots of different interests. on the whole i personally would give a pretty good marks for not getting into these individual congressmen getting something for their district type of thing. i think it was largely free of that and that is a big loss and when you've got such a big program i think it makes sense to cover lots of different areas and make it diverse because i think amy or someone said you can't just increase the scale of a single program too fast. >> i could jump in briefly as someone that jumped in as it was taking shape for the president had taken his oath of office you can talk about the health care plan and whether he should or shouldn't have had a more detailed blueprint but the stimulus package was done in the interest of time i think we would agree in terms of where the economy was at the time and second i think both examples of this stimulus and the health care bill we are seeing that
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they are much more involved in congress than you would think by virtue of -- of this stimulus bill in particular i will stick to the subject was much more shaped down to details in the white house than has been reported. i say that as a reporter. what's wrong with that picture. [laughter] >> when will you be reporting that? [laughter] >> just did. >> questions? phill leedy in the black shirt here in the middle. if you could keep your question sharp we can get as many as possible in the remaining ten minutes or so. >> i am a consulting anthropologist. much of this discussion has focused strictly on the domestic dimensions of the economy and i am wondering about the international ramifications for the dollar and for the economy in the future and how this is
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received. there is a range of issues but i think that question is clear. thanks. >> over here, keep it easy profit in the aisle. >> i'm with the associated journal contractors association of america and obviously our industry is probably more impact right now during this recession than any other we have approximately 19 per cent unemployment right now, lost over a million jobs in the last year so we are grateful there was a strong infrastructure component in the legislation although it could have been more significant. what we found recently by surveying members is most people are -- that have seen projects are hiring but a lot of people are staving off layoffs. in the anticipation of founding happening. and we are kind of hoping and working with agencies trying to hope that in the fall we will see more projects coming out. but right now it is a little bit disappointing in terms of what kind of results we are getting
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and i guess mr. zimmerman, what you see in terms of your local area people saying where's the infrastructure money? how is this impacting my daily life? how was it raising the issue with the needs are locally in northern virginia as compared to, you know, just every day? we've got $600 billion in the waste, water infrastructure, local communities can pay for that. we have a lot of stimulus money people saying hey i want clean water. what are people telling you back home? >> speed, i think the first question naturally should go to you on the broad impact of the stimulus bill, if any, for the global economy since the u.s. is obviously a huge player. >> i think that the global dimension is a big plus. it's amazing how cooperative countries around the world have been. to be blunt this is a united states mistake that screwed up the whole world economy.
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and rather than the rating noss -- >> [inaudible] >> no, the crisis. rather than berating us for the mistakes we've made the world has responded quickly. i am impressed the imf have tabulations how many other countries, china jumps to mind for quickly stepping in with a large stimulus programs. i think also the discussion at the g20 level has been very effective encouraging countries let's not go back to the trade protectionist measures of the great depression were tit-for-tat we start the trading system. most countries have been very positive on that with minor exceptions, everywhere there always a spot on the whole the story of cooperative action at the international level to try to manage this crisis i think has been very positive. i think another aspect we have gotten away from this u.s.
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european dominance through the g8. we are moving to ag20 type of structure which is much more global so i would give very high grades. i think our government deserves a lot of credit. i think they did reach out. so they are a very active player in this. >> france and germany reported growth unexpectedly in the last quarter to earn what extent of the u.s. package necessarily but there was well reported that president obama and germany were at odds over whether how much of a stimulus germany should have. >> well, germany fell i think what's happened with germany they got hard hit by the downturn because they are the biggest trading country among -- they are manufacturing, think of automobiles they produce. they got clobbered. naturally once the worst is over your the one that comes back first. so germany is down sharply for the first half of the year.
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but very recently they've started to come back up already. france i think in the case they managed it while. they were not as well impacted severely as we were in the financial sector. they protected their banks a little bit better. so, it's good news but i guess i think we overplayed the conflict too much. it's a good press but it's not really what was going on. what was really going on was an amazingly high degree >> i think globally we are now chris on your question about house is being felt locally, the american stimulus package and what do people say to you? are they say and where is the money or think you? [laughter] >> i think the question of particular was interested on the infrastructure side. there's the general question i think most people just figure
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there's all this stimulus money your problems are going away, right? and they don't necessarily understand the magnitude is small and mostly doesn't come to our level but even on the level it does hit and this will get back to the infrastructure part of this we said earlier some of the stuff is coming it's just that it takes time and hasn't happened yet. but if you look at what's been happening in this region and my state we've had major problems with transportation funding for quite some time we are basically not putting enough money into transportation finance for 20 years now as we have had an underfunded program which in the last couple of years because we've been running into economic issues for some time on the state level we've seen billions of dollars of cuts and last fall there was one part i think it was a 2 billion-dollar cut was announced. the stimulus package comes out and has money for transportation that goes directly to the state and virginia got 800 plus million dollars. 800 million is not chump change and i'm glad we haven't the when you had a 2 billion-dollar cut
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it doesn't mean you are suddenly rolling in money and yet in the other things i mentioned like actually being able to use the funds is very complex and there are a lot of obstacles. again a lot of this will be happening. the biggest part of the stimulus that is affecting my counties in the $9 million we are getting directly it is 10 million for one project that is one of the things being funded out of 800 million they started working on a year ago and stopped because it was shut down so sometime i think in the fall when the money starts flowing in that should be getting going again people will see that point yet it's not something you see happening every day and even when it does it is mostly funding things people felt they were getting anyway. mostly that's the rules already, you have to be ready to go. it was something you were going to do but didn't because you didn't have the money. it is not as much money as people think and it's mostly paying for things people in the
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stimulus program? >> i will take a woman, the woman in the last wrote, or second last row. >> i would like to know, how did the stimulus package help to stop or prevent foreclosures, and how did it solve the problems on housing crisis? >> what was the second question? >> who wants to take david's question on the vice-president will? do you have any -- >> i am too far from that. >> they are having a very active role. i think if you are a governor or
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mayor or county official -- but county officials, or county executive, you are probably on a regular weekly or monthly calls regarding the status of the spending and collect comments, feedback how the spending is going. i also -- it is where the coordination for the recovery implementation is happening so there are recovery stars in each of the agency that worked closely with joe biden's office. and you know, they have certainly been doing i think two things, and i was thinking about the way the package -- this package structured in such a way it is unjust congress of the administration's fault. there is inherent contradictions and one of them where joe biden's office is running as there is no waste fraud and abuse. it is the one thing in addition to the speed they have been very
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active in ensuring that that there is no wasteful spending and they've been very vocal about that as we know. that has -- it's interesting because they don't see the recovery board made up of almost all ids who are supposed to track this. that's separate. but i would say how does that feel locally? that is a very frustrating thing and i know joe blight in's office is aware of that but there is inherent contradiction between speed and enormous amount amount of rules reporting and regulation to ensure that is done and a very straight away and the local and state complaint about evin fathi saunier to have the money to go out fast -- they certainly don't want risk in the spending. they certainly are held publicly accountable the way the money is spent because the amount and
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mountain of requirements on them the ig is have 35 -- c enormous pot of money to monitor the accountability but the local has got cero money to staff and track and reduce risk at a time and they are laying off staff, a time they are cutting budgets. the ability for them to staff up the ball so staff the risk reduction has been hard so i think that is a contradiction of the bill. certainly a priority by the administration but i would also say there are signs the administration and joe biden's office are interested in making sure there are quality investments out of this as well. that complementing speed is some good innovation they can point to. >> quickly, you, amy, russell, chris, have pointed out the ways this implementation could be improved. as the vice president's office a
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place you can go to and say well, you know we have got these three separate application process he's using the same curve, optic -- >> fiber optic? >> fiber-optic cable. thanks. having a senior moment. [laughter] can locals go to them and say you could do this better and more effective? >> de ar -- they are now setting up a process where they can be more responsive because i think again, the first part of the six months was so much tension getting and i think you're going to see and i think this is one of -- the compliments to the team and the recovery office is that they are working closely with the agencies and starting to find a more systemic way to capture through the recovery.gov and other systems a way to capture this kind of feedback
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and then have the agency's sort through these comments and figure out how they can streamline, speed up, create the flexibility is within these programs to get the kind of outcomes we want. so it's still early but i think there is certainly a welcoming signal from them that they want to be very responsive to good implementation. >> it will be difficult for the administration to make midcourse corrections here. most of the money will be out the door in the spring. the train has left the station and how that money is going to be awarded so while everybody recognizes areas that could have been done better the demand for speed ultimately gets in the way of the ability to make corrections. i will say that the career bureaucracy has been engaged and working hard to get this done. it's been an unprecedented challenge. they are making weekly reports, sometimes daily reports what changed. we got more money out the door.
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that must be coming from the white house and omb and perhaps the vice president's office. at times when it's easy to criticize the bureaucracy the fact is a process that is so far had troops on the ground getting money out the door with procedures that seem irrational seems to be something to be applauded. >> and what will be the last question the leedy at the rear asked about the extent which the stimulus helped address for closure. my own sense is that it's of their programs the federal government has come up with that have done that but i will open it to anyone else who wants to address the foreclosure question. >> on housing generally this is an area where in terms of shuffle ready projects there are some i know of that are not happy because financing is available and not -- second it's like another case this part of this addressing that but there's
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not enough but that's probably one of the areas if they are looking to redirect something or add something i believe there is probably opportunities for things that could move quickly -- >> for instance, what? >> some of them involving affordable housing and the market rate. we have a project that is part market rate and affordable but the market rate lost its funding. and the fact the whole project collapsed that otherwise would be constructed today and housing people a year from now. >> it's interesting. >> thanks very much. this has been helpful to me as i go forward and whether or not there is a second stimulus. thanks for your interest in coming today and for your good questions. [applause] [inaudible conversations]
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in a very practical level the kind of changes and leadership that can make a huge difference. i am going to pick up on that and go to some examples of continuing change and how fundamentally different the method of thinking ought to be. one of the topics i've become most fascinated with for prisoners and then i want to say to examples of change. america works which is a remarkable company and new york, and chuck colson of the fellowship model that he and pat nolan have done such a great job of developing. i believe prison reform and prisoner rehabilitation should be a concern for all americans. today, 66% of all u.s. inmates or rearrested within three years of release and 52% in the back in prison.
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there are several organizations leading the way how we rehabilitate prisoners and effectively integrate them into society. america works is originally eckert i worked with on welfare reform. they have been found it under governor mario cuomo and they were able to break through at that time in the 80's in which several social workers went into private business and organized a for-profit company which will get paid if hard core unemployed actually changed their behavior enough to go to work and they only got their bonus if they would work for an minimal of six consecutive months. they became lost on gush langley successful which led other groups to hate them because they offered the opportunity -- >> [inaudible] >> because the america works was in indianapolis. then they have since branched into working with prisoners, formerly incarcerated folks who
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worked for direct employment when released from prison the organization works to develop a resonate, appropriate clothing, carfare and take all the things they learned working with hard-core unemployed and begin developing for prisoners how do you retrain people so they get a job, keep a job, or how to be on time, learn how to show up under a variety of circumstances. after a month in the america works program most individuals who were prisoners get hired. the companies get good workers, workers get good jobs and the government gets reduce cost for criminal-justice and the tax revenue for the people now a holding a job. to give an example, it costs california $47,000 a year to house one prisoner versus 81 time fee of $4,000 to get that person a job which is paid only when they keep the job for six months. so in a sense if california is going to release 40,000 people they should basically help america works or a parallel
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company we could call california works are about to deal with all 40,000 people and he would have a fundamentally different kind experience. chuckles and developed prison fellowship that provides spiritual, vocational, educational guidance to inmates in all 50 states and 150 countries world wide and relies on a network of more than 20,000 people. again, on union common on a full-time staff and we eat, no pension. all the things we are told automatically raises cost there are 20,000 volunteers who ministered to many of the 2.3 million prisoners in the united states. prison fellowship has and interchange freedom an initiative which is very tough. inmates are measured in value based programs that teach the best strategy is to enter society beginning 18 to 24 months prior to release. malae talked with pat about how
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challenging this is. this is a program where you don't smoke, you don't drink, you focus all day every day. they are really serious about helping people change their behavior and helping people change their future. according to a study of the freedom initiative in texas, only 8% of those participating are turned to jail within two years compared to 52% of all american prisoners that returned to jail within three years. i want to give you these two models as examples. these are not just more efficient ways of doing the same old things. these are fundamentally different approaches to achieve and out comes that are not achievable within the traditional barack receipts and that is a key part of. we are going to talk about policies specific areas and i want to start with the economy
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because i believe it is ironic james carville and 1982 had posted in the clinton campaign headquarters in little rock a sign that said it's the economy and i think this administration today would do well to post a sign in the oval office that says it's jobs stupid and the fact is we don't focus on jobs and we don't get people back to work and we don't create economic momentum we are in deep trouble as a country. america only works when americans are working. furthermore when you're faced with competitors like china and india you have to have a strategy for economic growth and economic to filament in a period of considerable challenge. our argument is if we want to build a safe prosperous and free future we need to create the most productive most creative most entrepreneurial pro-market economy that runs on smart and effective economic regulation. let me be clear.
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i believe if you set out and say well what maximize their are ways to do that. you said what maximize the number of small businesses created by small business there are ways to do that. if you said how can i have the most continuous process of innovation we know how to it just doesn't fit the political elite definition of the future which is high techs, bigger shocker c and politicians entered. so, long term we're going to need budgetary reform legislation. it's interesting the last congress more than a dozen bills introduced to establish entitlement and budget commission's but if all the legislation did was have the same old conversation within the same old frame work you in fact wouldn't achieve very much. you end up with a compromise in which we would raise taxes while marginally cutting spending in
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order to sustain a bigger government at higher cost with a smaller economy and fewer job creations. tax increases are a short-term fix the lead to bigger government and the weak economy. the fact that in the last year 11 states raised taxes to help eliminate budget gaps is absolutely amazing in the context of this economy. oregon added new top rates of 10.8% and 11% to race to enter the 53 million jobs. that kills jobs in oregon. california raised rates by one-quarter of a percent and already the highest income tax rate in the country and reduced the dependent tax credit that kills jobs and convinces people to leave california. delaware raised above $60,000. that kills jobs. new york raises top bracket production for higher income earners. that kills jobs. by the way i've talked to people
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moving out of new york city because they are now finding it finally so expensive compared to living for example in florida which has no income tax that the differential is unsustainable. hawaii, new jersey and wisconsin raise taxes on high-income earners. every one of those steps kills jobs. they also represent a distorted social policy and which we weaken families, take money away from working families to create a bureaucracy to do for the family when it would have done for itself if it still had the money to get the bureaucracy. but we give examples that are startling. under president truman, the deductions were a thousand dollars to $1,200 for married couples and five to $600 for each dependent. in 2,000 line inflation-adjusted figures would be $7,300 for married couples and 3650 for each dependent. now if you consider that you've been getting to look at fundamentally different models.
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by the way the original deduction from income tax would mean no one earning less than $8 million a year would pay anything. when income tax came and it was going to be very limited for a very small number of people very tiny. you have to learn $8 million in 2009 version dollars. but if you look at the way in which the states are desperate to find money and so in effect their exporting jobs to china and india. oregon not only raises top rate increased minimum tax for business to read delaware race receipts and business franchise taxes which says why would i want to franchising delaware? wisconsin reduced corporate tax breaks so why why open another factory in wisconsin? nv adjusted its business tax at a time when the nevada economy is one of the hardest hit with property having a deep drop in value than all but two states.
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kansas produced business tax credits. 19 states increased taxes by more than 1%. only one state cut taxes by more than 1% so if you look at that and go through item after item of the north dakota cut individual and then delete the business income taxes by 50 million a good example where energy revenue was helpful because north dakota is having an energy boom. so our argument is if we want economies that encourage business development and freedom in the marketplace we need to reform the current tax structure and remember as winston churchill warned that government is not the source of wealth as churchill once remarked the nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle so taxation isn't a central form of wealth, taxation in fact reduce is wealth and reduces jobs. i think we have to focus in designing the government of the future on doing it dramatically
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better job of reducing the regulatory barriers and cutting taxes that are discouraged on abortion and economic growth. that is why an american solutions we propose to programs to create jobs and stimulate economic growth. we have created a program called jobs here jobs now jobs first which we think is steps for jobs and prosperity and we did this because we are convinced that the politician protection act that was the so-called stimulus bill will clearly in the and not create the level of economic growth we want to read the federal reserve board we could expect a long period of increased economic activity without new jobs and that we could easily have eight or 9% on an plan for a long time. i think the american people will find that a very unacceptable future and i think the left will come in and say we need even more big government spending when the fact is by 3-1 most
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americans believe business tax cuts are a better way to create jobs than more bureaucratic spending so we suggest four steps for jobs and prosperity in a program we call jobs here jobs now jobs first and i want to tell you what the steps are and why we picked them. first is immediate payroll tax relief. while many people do not pay the income tax everyone who has a salary pays a social security and medicare tax. and in this economy you. so if you cut the social security and medicare tax and we propose a 50%, to year 50% reduction in the payroll tax you immediately boost take-home pay for even the least wealthy person so the minimum wage workers currently paying social secure a medicare tax would get a significant increase immediately if you had to year cut. we also propose that match also
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be cut for two years by 50 per cent which means every small business in america would have more cash flow to begin to pay off debt, to be able to invest in new equipment and create jobs and remember three of every four jobs are created by small business. now the way we would do this -- by the way this would be a huge benefit if you are self-employed because you would get both and will your match and and when you tax system would have a significant increase in take-home pay if you were self-employed. remember in a state like california there are more people self-employed than there are union members so you can have a dramatic impact on the economy and offset some of the damage done by state taxes. we would find the money and remember earlier i talked about fact we had balanced the budget for four consecutive years i am quite comfortable in a 4 trillion-dollar federal budget we can find the money to put into social security and
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medicare trust fund said they would be held harmless. i would start by taking all the unexpected money along with 300 to $400 billion of the on spent stimulus spending and diverting them into paying for the payroll tax cuts. in addition, we would sell all the government ownership that has been acquired the last two years to get all those businesses back in the marketplace, take the money that would durham, put that in the social security and medicare trust fund and i would propose zeroing all money going to acorn because that is after all an organization dedicated to helping the poor and if we to call the money they get and give it directly to the war in the form of a tax cut for the lowest paid workers surely that would be the model of what acorn says the stand for so they should be thrilled by this opportunity. the second thing enable american companies to once again become the most competitive exporters
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the irish tax rate which is 12.5% for corporations. today the united states when you combined state and federal taxes has the most expensive corporate tax in the world. this goes back to to plus two equals four. i got turned on to this by craig their and when he was the head of intel pointed out microsoft has all of their licenses and ireland and he said whitey think microsoft has of their licenses and ireland? they pay 12.5% versus paying what would in some american states be over 40%. so, to plus two equals four, and you are a corporate ceo or obligation to stockholders to get a return on your investment would you rather pay 12.5% or 40%? all of our liberal friends get out and kill about on patriotic companies let's make profitable to be patriotic by reducing the tax rate to the irish corporate rate of 12.5% he will find lots of american and foreign ceo is
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and say i would like more factories in america because they will have a lower tax rate in germany or britain or france or japan. ford, if you really want to compete with china for jobs and won the most innovative. of entrepreneurial society in the world match the chinese capital gains rate. if we had no capital gains tax the amount of capital which would flow into the united states, the number of new factories, the number of their businesses and new jobs would be breathtaking and we will rapidly become the leading exporting country in the world. finally, if your social values are then you believe in the work ethic, you believe in savings and you believe that families ought to save for their children to have a better future it is absolutely irrational to have a death tax and as a cultural value we should abolish the death tax permanently to send the signal we want to encourage people to work all their lives,
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save all their lives and be able to save resources for their children so that gives you an overview what we think is -- those tax cuts would radically accelerate economic growth in america and would dramatically reduce on and point and if you simply calculate -- if we were 4% how much bigger with the tax revenue be from people going to work? how much bigger with the economy the? how much less what we spend on a planet medicaid and other government spending? you begin to get the circle of economic growth that enables you to go back to a balanced budget. we also have an american solution in addition to the for eight other proposals for jobs and prosperity i am not going into detail on it now but i will tell you a strong robust american energy program is the key part of that and a strong education program and health reform and i will talk briefly about all of those. on occasion, the race simple model. world-class jobs require world
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class learning. you cannot compete with china and india with an inadequate education system and that an adequate system can't be fixed by no child left behind. you need a new model of every american getting ahead because you have to many adults under educated for the world market and you can't say to someone who's 22 we are not going to help you but we will fix k-12 because you have to have 40 to 50 years of person on the job market so we need to have a fundamental new approach that includes vocational technical school, includes college, it includes k-12 but also includes homeschooling and learning on your own and it includes things like the university of phoenix on libeler in. we have to have a fundamentally new approach to 365 days a year capacity to keep learning at a rapid rate so every american can be fully informed. i mentioned earlier 2 billion minutes. i wish every community in
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america what watch that film and have a dialogue of does it mean and what we have to do some schools can be competitive. compton points of 60% of u.s. students have no science to biology. only 18% of students take advanced classes and physics, chemistry or biology yet every indian student on the academic track takes four years of physics topped by a physics major. only 45% of u.s. students take math work beyond basic old georgia and interest rate to geometry. remember these are the students that have been dropped out. if you add in the students that dropped out you realize how huge the educational challenge to the next generation is if we are serious about competing with india and china. september 17th i'm about to announce american solutions will be hosting the premier new documentary 2 billion minutes a 21st century solution hosting the event with the education of quality project and u.s. chamber
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of commerce institute for comparative work force. it's interesting the film highlights the basis school which is a tucson arizona charter school "newsweek" rated as the best school in the country and we think there is a lot to be learned and this is the kind of opportunity to say every school could be this good if we apply the right principles and prepare to insist on excellence. i believe detective flirting is critical. i don't see how you create job opportunities with productive been fallen planned for americans and a knowledge based internet connected global the competitive world without having high-quality learning in america. international competition and future of this country require effective learning by all americans and economic viability of the community requires effective learning to read the future of our children requires the learn -- most important
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debates in this country the next few years and i want to say we are actually directly involved with president obama and with secretary of education arne duncan and reverend al sharpton and we will be this afternoon and then friday we are announcing we are tomorrow morning on the today show we will be going nation white in a joint effort that is try partisan democrat republican independent to get every state to adopt the program. this is one of the places i strongly agree with president obama. i would go further. i believe in vouchers or as i would call them pell grants for k-12 but i'm happy to say the president's position is strong on charter schools and if you can find a place to work together this is a useful and i can see up front if you told me two years ago al sharpton and i would be going around the
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country jointly advocating things i would have been dubious of that new say we believe parents have to demand accountability and choice. parents must have transparency about their child's achievement. parents must have the ability to pick the right school for their child. parents should have the right never to have their kids trapped in failing schools. this is fundamentally about the nature of america. we believe in nova and its charter system. all the money allocated for student education goes directly to the school. the school manages its own staff whereby it is exempt from the law regarding tenure and need not unionized. this will define its own curriculum in line with state standards and assessments. students in charter schools are not exempt from state assessments. the schools are not exempt from reporting requirements nor should they be the have the same obligation for transparency as any other school. steve walsh allow for the first school to franchise its model without limitation that means the need not apply for a new school every time they can build
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a new one if they have the demand they must be able to serve. the state should have no caps on the number of charter schools that can be approved and the process for charter schools should be smooth and efficient. every station open their system to part-time teachers so retired physicists and edward pharmacists or local accountants could teach one or two hours a day and bring all which to the classroom and business adult expectations to the students and programs like teach for america should be encouraged and of limited. every state should adopt early graduation program so students can learn faster in the state curriculum and students who can graduate early could be awarded the cost of the years they skid as automatic scholarships towards college or vocational technical school. i know that jackie cushman red lead a foundation where there were seventh and eighth graders with the same wages as mcdonald's employees if they stayed in school and did their homework and they had a dramatic improvement and the number of
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poor students and these were poor neighborhoods and fulton county and the students responded -- this voice surprises me this is a shock to some education theorists. where children understand money. poor children understand if they could earn money. they want to change their behavior if they actually get the money. something we experiment with years ago when i remember, i would take my speech money we had a program called earning by learning and they paid $2 a book in public housing for every book children would read and had huge response because they love the idea of getting $2 a book and they were willing to read lots of books. it wasn't complicated. all of us understand when we are watching tiger woods when a golf match or somebody negotiate to be a football player or a movie star or rock star make money somehow we come around to these young people who are poor and need money and we say i wonder what might encourage them to
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study so we encourage people to look at this and it might curb the dropout rates seen as a mini failing schools and we think it might break the cycle of poverty dependency in prison. so that is is education. on energy we think there is an american energy program to use american energy to create american jobs and strengthen american national security. we believe if you want to build a safe prosperous and free future you have to create a fundamentally new energy infrastructure to facilitate a 21st century energy economy. in fact for many states the key to closing the budgetary gap lines and increase in energy resources. the six states that projected budget surpluses in 2009 durham substantial revenue from natural resources. alaska will bring from oil and natural gas production taxes.
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we list some examples of states that are getting more and more resources from the various severance fees and you will notice an example louisiana. it's interesting people worry about julich of short. of louisiana and texas we have bills since of the wells and we have had four major hurricanes the last few years. none of the wells have had a problem. it's much more dangerous for the environment to bring oil by ship from saudi arabia are venezuela and at american solutions we propose ten steps for generating more american energy now. the first became famous last year as natural curatorial now pay less and the first time in 27 years the congress failed to pass the ban on exploring offshore of of our schwarzenegger agreed they could drill more of santa barbara for the first time since 1969. a position by 59% of the people
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in santa barbara county so both offshore and in alaska we believe there's a tremendous amount of oil and it's interesting there are continuing discoveries of new layers of oil and natural gas on a grand scale in fact there are new technologies for finding natural gas and shale involving drilling down 4 miles i'm sorry, 8,000 feet and then to link horizontal lee for 4 miles out of the same wild and they are now discovering enough natural gas and shale we probably have 1300 years of supply and the united states of natural gas and it's going to create in western new york and pennsylvania, eastern ohio, west virginia, kentucky all the way through louisiana, mississippi to texas and oklahoma a huge zone of people who will make money off the natural resources in their farm land on a scale nobody thought was possible ten years ago to the example of new technology. we should lift the ban on developing oil shale and how
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red, white and utah where we have three times as. we should encourage building new refineries and gas processing plants in the united states. we should reduce bureaucratic obstacles and prevent frivolous litigation. we should encourage clinical development plans. people need to remember china opens a new coal plant every week. if we have any hope of dealing with carbon loading in the atmosphere you have to have clean coal technology because you are all going to get rid of coal plants the next 30 years and coal is the most abundant single resource in terms of energy. we have over 500 years of supply of coal. we should have a new fuel standard for flex-fuel cars than all cars ought to be built as flex tool which enables you to use biofuel and enables you to use a variety of approaches which both expand. remember the ethanol grown in the united states is money in the united states and my body is
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is if my choice is between biofuel made in america or importing oil from either venezuela were saudi arabia i have cero doubt we are better off as a country to use biofuel. eight, we need prices to accelerate breakthroughs in technology. ninth, we should invest in nuclear power. there are small nuclear power plants that i think will be a tremendous breakthrough how to develop nuclear power and finally to keep the tax credit for enhanced recovery because we actually want to maximize the recovery of americans will not force us into dependence. that gives the example of energy. on infrastructure, i think -- steve referred to some of this earlier and i agree. we are at the beginning of a smart infrastructure mall. i am not lead to go through in great detail but if you look what is happening with the miami-dade smart critic and other experiments, we are about to have an ability to create information-which data which allows you for example to have different pricing at different times of the day.
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it allows you to have an ability for people to decide in terms of their schedule when do they want to travel and you can actually dramatically change the load pattern of most highways. if you will also find that there are new electric grid capabilities so you both have a smart power in terms of smart electric grids and transportation and the combination of the two, the use of information technology for example i met with several companies beginning to install smart homes so people automatically drive their wash at the lowest cost of electricity that day because their home computer talks with the electric utility computer and can literally tell you if you do the drawing between three and five in the morning you will get charged one-fifth as much as if you do the drawing in the afternoon when people have
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air-conditioning on and there is a whole series of these kind of things evil thing that will allow us to have a better use of energy and of transportation grid so both electric grid and the transportation great need to become smart systems. i personally am in favor of looking at now connected levitation trains. if you look what the chinese are doing i think it is very sobering you can now go to shanghai and ticket to hundred 50-mile an hour train and virtually all of the very high-speed trains in the world are being built in china and a suburb of shanghai is a sobering place because 20 years ago there was almost nothing and today the gross domestic product alone is $30 billion so you have an enormous explosion of economic activity.
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spain has a train that goes from madrid at 186 miles an hour. the french have the tgv which is a very fast train that crosses mostly france. japan has the bullet train. there are other projects. i think we have to fundamentally rethink our entire approach to the real battle i am opposed to simply giving money to an amtrak bureaucracy on behalf of unionized work forces to spend 20 years getting almost nothing done. i think we ought to look seriously at creating corridors and which you have a public-private partnership in which people with the profit motive build very rapidly high-speed capabilities that at least match china and if you had the equivalent of a train from boston to washington or from sand francisco to san diego or some parts of florida you could begin to develop and the ability to have people use the train on
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a grand scale but you want to do it in areas with high density, a great deal of traffic and you both want to take people off the airplane and take people off the highway and i think that can be done but it takes a much different approach. for smaller projects, i think you want to get the federal government to back out. the point steve made it costs twice as much to build federal highways in a city as it cost to build a city highway so you're asking the city to get the federal money half as many miles both the least they are not paying that we should grant a number of these things allow the local governments to be practical, allow them to contract out and in the process i think you've got to get a lot of fighting the budget act to create a federal capital budget. when you have something like one of the projects we are working
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on at american solutions is a 21st century air traffic control system. if we had a space-based gps style for dimensional gps system that enabled airplanes and affect to fly with much greater accuracy and much greater density airlines would buy 10% less fuel so both from an environmental and economic standpoint there would be enormous -- we would also eliminate all the air traffic colds in the northeast and would save an immense -- cao miniet you have found yourself waiting either at laguardia or to get into or out and do understand what i'm talking about. you get on the plane and the announce we have an air traffic cold now use it for two hours. somebody figured out actually with all of the holds it is now slow were to go from o'hare to laguardia by jet than it was to go by d.c. three in 1946.
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because 1946 and took off and landed. now you have all these various controls and the federal bureaucracy. we clearly can build a 20th century control system that will save an amazing amount of money. it will free up the northeast corridor and enable philadelphia for example not to be trapped in constant air traffic control holds. if you're going to do that we'll to build them as fast as we can which requires a capital budget approach rather than the annual appropriation of a tiny amount of money so it takes 22 years to do something that should have taken three years. the analogy i will give you i've written two novels about world war ii. in world war ii from the japanese attack at pearl harbor to our victory over japan in august of 1945 is three years
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and eight months. so 44 months from december 1945 to the middle august 1941 to the middle of august, 1945 we defeat nazi germany and italy. three months and eight months. it took 23 years to add a runway at the airport. now, you can't a bureaucracy between bureaucracy and litigation. where you become so mosul found that we can't function. so we need very fundamental changes. we need a capital budget that the federal level so we can invest in things and there's a practical reason. if you notice here that our country has decreased infrastructure spending from 3.6% of gross domestic product to 2.7%. the reason is annual budgets have a huge bias in favor of current services. and whereas capital budgets have a huge body is in favor of the future. so
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